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Star Wars Celebration kicked off in grand fashion Thursday with the "40 Years of Star Wars" panel, moderated by Return of the Jedi and Rogue One's Warwick Davis, that brought together many of the stars and filmmakers behind the beloved saga.

Previously announced guests included Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker), Ian McDiarmid (the Emperor/Darth Sidious), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian), Kathleen Kennedy (Lucasfilm President), and Dave Filoni (executive producer, Star Wars Rebels). But it wouldn't be a true fan convention without appearances by some surprise guests.

To roaring applause from fans, George Lucas took the stage and shared his thoughts on the franchise, saying he created the saga for kids. "I'm not supposed to say this and I wasn't supposed to say it then, but it's a film for 12 year olds," he said.

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No, this isn't an episode of Orange is the New Black

While Amazon continues refining its delivery-by-UAV dream, Yelp is gearing up to test a grounded method to autonomously transport take out. The company is partnering with Marble to use their wheeled drone, which is designed to carry perishable cargo,...

It hasn't even been two years since Hyundai spun out its Genesis luxury badge as a separate division, but the new group is already making a name for itself. Genesis has unveiled its first experimental SUV, the GV80 Concept, and the prototype clearly...

You've already seen Nintendo revive the NES and Nokia reintroduce the 3310, so why not resurrect more '90s tech? Bandai certainly doesn't see a problem with it. The company has relaunched the classic Tamagotchi toy in near-original form to mark its...

EA promised to reveal a trailer for its Star Wars Battlefront sequel on April 15th during the Star Wars Celebration event, but it appears to have popped up online a bit early. The 30-second teaser clip shows "game engine footage," with hints at what...

Lucasfilm swore that it wouldn't create a digital version of the late, great Carrie Fisher for future Star Wars movies, but that doesn't mean she'll be cut out entirely. Her brother Todd has revealed that Disney still wants to include Carrie in Episo...

HBO has released a trio of new promos that feature a number of cast members from Game of Thrones, sporting what could be their new looks for Season 7.

The network posted all of the three promos on Facebook, one of which you can watch below:

We've put together a gallery with images of each character featured in the promos. Give it a look below to see Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, Kit Harington as Jon Snow, and many more.

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When McLaren Racing heads to the Bahrain Grand Prix next week, the constructor will take with it something the motorsport has not yet seen trackside: a 3D printer. The Formula One team has confirmed that as an expansion of its partnership with 3D pri...

Much to the consternation of last-gen Titan X owners, NVIDIA recently unveiled the GTX 1080 Ti, a GPU that offers more performance for nearly half the price. Luckily, rich gamers can get regain bragging rights by dropping another $1,200 on the Titan...

Things have been changing quite a bit in Washington, D.C., when it comes to immigration, thanks to the new regime. Unfortunately, a new memo being sent out from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will be making it harder for computer programmers coming from outside the country to get their H1B work visas, which could severely impact the U.S. tech sector and the games industry

The USCIS memo, sent late last week, said that a previous statement, called "Guidance memo on H1B computer related positions" and issued in 2000 by former director Terry Way of Nebraska Service Center, is now obsolete. The NSC is again overseeing America's immigration and citizenship H1B and H1B1 visa applications after a hiatus from 2006 to 2016. Way's memo deemed all computer programming jobs as "Specialty Occupations."

The new memo took issue with the old guidelines, saying there was no delineation about the complexity of a computer job and essentially created one classification making them all equal, including entry level positions.

"The memorandum also does not properly explain or distinguish an entry-level position from one that is, for example, more senior, complex, specialized, or unique," the new order said. "This is relevant in that, absent additional evidence to the contrary, the Handbook indicates that an individual with an associate's degree may enter the occupation of computer programmer."

The Handbook mentioned is the 1998-99 and 2000-01 Occupational Outlook Handbook put out by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Statistics.

It now becomes incumbent on the applicant to prove they are indeed specialized and not just focused on information technology. "Based on the current version of the Handbook, the fact that a person may be employed as a computer programmer and may use information technology skills and knowledge to help an enterprise achieve its goals in the course of his or her job is not sufficient to establish the position as a specialty occupation."

The new ruling will likely have a significant impact on Silicon Valley and companies that rely heavily on the highly qualified programmers and engineers trained outside the United States. In the short term, this will also put an extra burden on companies looking to fill a position to provide extra documentation for people they want to hire to "prove" that the position is not only a specialty, but actually requires programming. Companies may even have to go so far as to provide a list of duties that the applicant would be required to do.

The memo comes as the Trump administration continues to push the American workforce to the forefront and is trying to cut down on not only illegal immigrants, but jobs going to foreign nationals, no matter how qualified. This seems to go hand-in-hand with travel restrictions and increased scrutiny by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement on anyone coming into the United States on a visa. There have already been reports of people with legitimate visas being turned away at the borders or airports.

Just last week, the United States and Britain issued travel restrictions for several Middle Eastern countries and airports, curbing the use in the cabin of electronic devices larger than a cellphone. That ruling could impact many tech and gaming developers looking to attend conferences here, such as E3 this June. Several game companies have stepped up to assist affected developers and speak out against any immigration bans. 

Google revealed more details about its first machine learning chip, the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). According to Google, the chip has 15-30x higher inference performance than a Haswell CPU and an Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU, and it is 40-80x more efficient.

Ford is currently valued at about $45.1 billion. Tesla is now worth $47.8 billion, reports Bloomberg. Last year, Tesla delivered less than 80,000 cars. Ford, America's second largest automaker, sold 6.7 million vehicles.

One of the biggest points of contention between music streaming giant Spotify and the record labels that provide it with songs is the service's free tier. Regardless of whether you pay for a subscription or not, Spotify users have access to the same...

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The DC Extended Universe continues to grow, with WB reportedly moving forward with a Batgirl movie to be written and directed by Joss Whedon. Whatever your thoughts on the DCEU, that's a pretty exciting prospect.

Entertainment Weekly is also reporting that the movie will draw heavily from DC's New 52 Batgirl comics, specifically those written by Gail Simone. That gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect from the new film in terms of tone and subject matter. If you're not familiar with Simone's Batgirl run, here are five ways her work could wind up inspiring the new movie.

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The CW continues to dive into the world of DC Comics with the new TV pilot Black Lightning and now our first look at the title character has been revealed.

Check out the image below to see Cress Williams (Hart of Dixie) as Black Lightning, in the latest DC Comics-based project from executive producer Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, DC's Legends of Tomorrow).

Cress Williams stars as Jefferson Pierce / Black Lightning.

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Were you bummed out by the cliffhanger at the end of season 1 of SANTA CLARITA DIET? Well have no fear, because Netflix has ordered up a second season of the delicious zombie dramedy. The series, starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, will begin shooting its second season this summer. There’s no word yet on […]

Helping paralyzed people move on their own has been a lot tougher than 1970s TV shows led us to believe it would be. For what they believe is the first time, researchers used tech to bypass a quadriplegic patient's severed spinal cord, helping him mo...

Domino's has unleashed another set of pizza delivery drones, this time in Germany and the Netherlands. Last year, it worked with Flirtey to drop pizza to customers in New Zealand using unmanned aerial vehicles. For this pilot program, however, it cho...

Death Note is the kind of show where you try to watch one episode, but end up losing an entire weekend to its exhaustingly-tense cat-and-mouse chase, and you aren’t even mad about it. Despite some poorly-received plot choices in the middle, it’s an intelligently written, smartly paced and consistently engrossing series that’s being made into a live-action film on Netflix on August 25, but you should probably watch the anime first (it's streaming on Netflix and Hulu) anyway, even if you don’t tend to like anime.

For those who’ve never heard of it (minor story spoilers to follow), Death Note is a 2006 anime adaptation of a 2003 manga that follows the story of Light Yagami, a high school student who happens across a supernatural notebook that grants him the ability to kill anyone, any way he likes, just by writing their name in the book. Light, considering himself a vigilante, tries to use the book to ‘cleanse the world of evil’, and effectively plays God, which leads an incredibly skilled detective to try to hunt him down. It’s not easy to find someone who can kill someone with natural causes without even being near them, but the book does have some important rules and caveats, and so the cat-and-mouse chase begins.

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Even though it has been unofficially available on Chrome since 2014

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